Roxanna Slade Part 27

As it turned out, a fair amount. But first I had to convince the children that the plan was right. When Leela and Wilton drove me home, Dinah and Harley were waiting in the kitchen planked down in front of Palmer's TV like souls in a

trance. It was the first time I truly realized what television would do to the country, the young minds anyhow.

I quietly made myself a pot of coffee strong enough to eat through tile and sat beside them. When the next advertis.e.m.e.nt came on the screen, I asked Harley to stop it please. Strange that, with all I've forgot, I can rerun that whole commercial plain tonight. It was for Frosty Morn pork products, and it showed a cartoon line of plump pigs dancing a French cancan. In a squealing chorus they were singing

The height of a piggie's ambition From the day he is born Is the hope that he will be good enough To be a Frosty Morn.

Why is that as clear as a papercut today when I can't remember the names of old cousins I meet in town?

Anyhow against their better will the children finally turned to face me. Big as their problem was, the pigs had them grinning.

I said "I've made a plan that seems right to follow. Don't stop me till you've heard it."

They looked to each other, still not quite themselves after living inside that television all afternoon.

I said "Dinah, your grandmother Slade has asked you to come stay with her up on the river. Mally Shearin will be in the house too. She's there night and day now. We'll get you a school excuse from the doctor, and you'll stay there till the baby comes."

Dinah and her grandmother had always liked each other, and Miss Olivia was certain that Dinah had polished the moon. But the first thing Dinah said now was "Mother, you'll be with me, won't you?"

I hadn't thought that far ahead. So I said "I'll take you up and stay till you're settled, then come up every few days and every weekend. But no, I think it'll look more natural if I stay here and run this house. You can't leave houses too long--they die." That last was just an idle remark that I hadn't planned.

But when Dinah heard it, she nodded fast and finally said "This house has been dead since my father died, and there's nothing you or anybody else can do about it."

That puzzled poor Harley. He still didn't break his usual silence, but he looked over at me, and his little mouth wrenched up. He was back inffbeing a child again, his mental age, and on my side.

It bothered me too. Was Dinah out to hurt me? For the time being anyhow, I chalked it up to her age and the genuine weight of sadness she had every reason to feel from more than one cause. I'd need to watch her closely now and try to keep her from aiming downward into whatever tendency for depression I might have pa.s.sed into her bloodstream the night I conceived her.

Again these arrangements were made in June of 1953. From Dinah's memories and the doctor's report, the baby seemed likely to come in early February. In that case Dinah would miss one whole year of school at least. It also meant that she would be in the hardest part of her pregnancy in the very gloomiest days of winter--endless dreary rain, a snowfall or two--and though Miss Olivia had put oil burners in three of the downstairs rooms, the old Slade house was far from an ideal place to visit in less than bright weather.

Harley drove us up there with Dinah's things. I'd thought of course that Leela would drive us. But Dinah said "Mother, Miss Olivia needs to know Harley better. He'll be hoping to visit me as often as he can, and we need to know right off if Grandmother means to be spiteful and shame him."

I told her it was my sense that Miss Olivia could digest anything an alligator could --an alarm clock, a butcher knife--but sure if she wanted Harley to be judged at the start, then let him dare it. It was my deep wish then that Harley would simply wither away on the vine of Dinah's mind, but I knew not to say so.

Miss Olivia had said we should get there for the midday meal, and we pulled up to the house on schedule. Harley rushed to set Dinah's bags and boxes on the porch till her room was a.s.signed. And since n.o.body came out to meet us, Dinah and I went on in the front door, calling "We're here" all the way to the kitchen before they heard us.

Miss Olivia and Mally were each at work-- Miss Olivia at the squatty woodstove that only she would have fired up on such a hot day, and

Mally slicing hard-boiled eggs over by the sink. Neither of them said a word when they saw us.

But Dinah walked slowly forward to her grandmother and kissed her pale lips.

Miss Olivia took Dinah by the wrist and held her still for a long searching moment. Then she said "This is your house as much as mine, darling girl. Let's eat this feast." She gestured around herself to the number of tureens and bowls of fresh produce, smoked ham and bread.

When I didn't speak but stood on in the doorway, Miss Olivia faced me and said "Honey, you planning to fly back home on angel wings before you eat sweet Mally's harvest?" Her eyes had almost shut again, owing to a broad smile--her rarest offering. She was literally that glad to have her granddaughter near for a while whatever the reason.

I said "Moths ate my angel wings and, yes ma'm, I'm hungry." To my almost certain knowledge, Miss Olivia had never called me more than Anna before in her life and surely not Honey.

By then young Harley had come up beside me. I hadn't known it but it soon turned out that he'd met Miss Olivia on more than one occasion in the past, times when he drove Dinah up here to visit in the months her father was so sick. He said "We're both very grateful to you, ma'm."

Miss Olivia gave him a look that was either peaceful or as hard as hailstones. Her eyes were so pale it was hard to tell. Then she said "Grateful? Yes. You both ought to be."

When I looked to Mally, she was smiling again. Some genuine beauty was swimming down in her, way beneath the skin.

I felt like it was somehow headed for me with some kind of news that would brace my heart. And I thought We're all going to get through this.

Well all of us did, not the way we expected but that seldom happens in any department. One of us took the longest way of all through the problem--on out of the world. Or maybe it's the shortest, depending where you land. But I still think what happened to all was almost surely for the best and showed the hand of Fate in one of its more seemly moments. Harley drove me home late that June afternoon, and I did what I'd told Dinah I would.

I stayed at home, kept the vegetable garden

and the house on their routines, answered occasional questions about my daughter by telling as much of the truth as the questioner could use. Mostly I'd say her grandmother Slade was growing feebler and needed help and that Dinah herself needed country rest for a nerve condition. It was my nerves I meant but n.o.body knew that.

To the best of my knowledge, it satisfied people. At least I never heard vicious rumors or unkind laughter. Why should I? The only people other than the children who knew the full facts were Miss Olivia, Mally, I, Leela and Harley's parents (if he'd told both of them--I was never sure whether his father knew). Black Simon was bound to have figured it out on his own, but I told him only as much as I thought he needed to know, and it didn't alter his loyalty or his natural good nature by a notch either way.

So through the whole summer, I was on my own alone in the house for most of the time. Leela's son Wilton was eleven by now and was not as wrapped up in our old games as he'd once been, but he stayed over with me numerous nights. And we sometimes managed an hour or so on the dark porch late, just us and the sky when the seamless utter trust we took in each other's nearness could rise in us again and ease any pain the day might have brought.

Like a good many married women with children, I'd halfway dreaded the day when I'd be a widow with grown gone children and nothing left in the house but me, tribes of mice, an attic of bats and every now and then a black snake to chill any blood that might have overheated. But through those months I slowly came to prize the silence. The loneliness slowly turned into solitude, a condition I'd known precious little of in my crowded life.

n.o.body knew the first thing about solitude in those packed years of endless kin, not unless they were hermits way back in the woods gnawing on half-cooked songbirds and turnips. You might not be married or anybody's parent, but your chances of getting twenty minutes' solitude were nonexistent unless you changed your appearance entirely, vanished in the night and dug you a cave with at least two exits in the Blue Ridge Mountains or points farther west.

And on many nights when Wilton was home with his own parents, I'd sit on my front porch like the last soul left on Earth, telling myself that the

pa.s.sing car lights were meaningless mineral bodies in the dark and that, at least, I was left with the full reward for years of tending other souls. The reward was this needlessness pouring up through me. I even allowed myself to think more than once that if my time should run out now--this given instant--and my cool remains in this clean nightgown be found next morning by the paperboy, then I'd have died a happy woman despite the discouragements I'd fought through.

Leela or Harley would drive me up to the river for a visit or an overnight stay when I felt duty calling or when any of Dinah's or Miss Olivia's letters gave cause for curiosity. Generally speaking right on through August, they both seemed almost alarmingly fine.

I can truthfully claim that jealousy has played a slim part in my life. But on some of those visits, the dry hand of jealousy would sometimes rake the back of my neck when I'd watch how Dinah had fitted her life to Miss Olivia's tall outline--still plain to trace as a granite cliff face--and I'd see Miss Olivia's old-ivory eyes (that had watched five of her own children die) follow Dinah's swelling form through a room and then boil down their ebony pupils to coal-dust-black in sheer contentment to know that she might be an old woman with agonized bones but was leaving behind this piece of herself and--inside Dinah--a still younger piece on its way toward daylight.

All through the first three weeks of September, summer put on a mean fling for itself. It was over a hundred degrees in the shade for a number of days. Even in those times before white people were spoiled by air conditioning, that much damp heat was hard on everybody. You hated to fire up the whole kitchen just to cook yourself the merest morsel, so you tinkered with your windows and shutters to see what combination of open and shut worked best at what time of day, and then by bedtime you found yourself haunting different rooms of the house in search of a breeze and a dry place to lie.

Alone as I was I wound up sitting out on the porch most nights till past bedtime waiting till the house had cooled as much as it could, then sleeping on a pallet on the floor of whatever room felt nearly bearable. Even at two and three in the morning, the floor would be warm as a

human pressed too close against you.

An occasional treat would come in the form of a thunderstorm. Since my early childhood I'd been the only woman I knew who loved real lightning and thunder loud enough to shake the whole house.

One night that summer with Dinah gone, a bolt of lightning struck right by the house. And a ball of blue fire the size of a child's head rolled out of the light socket by my bed and pa.s.sed through the hall door. Fireb.a.l.l.s were common enough, with antique wiring. Still I halfway wondered whose ghost it might be. It caused no harm in any case and gave me a little entertainment in the swelter.

More than anything in years, that summer's meanness made me feel my age. I'd pause every minute or so and think I believe it's bound to be two degrees hotter than it was just now. That kind of thinking is strictly adult. In those days anyhow children and young people scarcely noticed the heat. They'd just shake their heads to fling off the water and go right on with their furious lives. But the heat wave of 1953 nearly did me in. So much so that I phoned Miss Olivia's place daily at least to check on everybody's health up there.

If Miss Olivia answered she'd call me a goose for worrying about them. "Anna, I was born in the fires of h.e.l.l. I'm headed there eventually. Fire's my home--I thought you'd noticed. Go fix yourself some cold lemonade and find you a weaker soul to pamper." When I'd ask to speak to Dinah, Miss Olivia would sometimes tease me by saying "Dinah's out chopping cornstalks" or some such foolishness.

If I insisted and got Dinah's voice, she'd also claim to be doing fine. Once she told me they'd waked up deep into the previous night--Miss Olivia, her and Mally--and walked to the river and stretched out on quilts on the pavilion there and told ghost stories till sunrise sent them back inside. Dinah laughed at the memory. So I didn't ask if Larkin or Ferny, Palmer or Major or anyone older had showed up or touched any one of their hands.

But the visits I paid them increased my concern. Miss Olivia was pale as a peaked child's hand. Mally had lost a good deal of weight bending over that blistering woodstove for three full meals

plus the extra attentions to a pregnant child and a ruined old woman. And while Dinah went on growing as expected, her eyes were taking on a hollow look that made me fear that the baby was somehow turning against her from the depths of her womb. They can choose to do that. I'd seen that look in many pregnant women's eyes through the years. And I'd learned to dread or welcome it, depending on whether the mother's life seemed ready for a child at that time and place.

Meanwhile I'd gone on quietly gathering whatever information I could find on the matter of unwanted infants. I'd mentioned the fact to no one but Leela, and she'd suggested I write around to the nearest orphanages--Oxford and Raleigh--and the State Health Department. Everybody answered with startling promptness, and every answer was bleak as a sleet storm. Yes, they all accepted such children under certain conditions. And they seemed to feel they could place Dinah's child in a "loving home" in a matter of days.

I'd visited the Oxford Orphanage years ago when a distant cousin and her husband were h.e.l.l-bent on adopting a daughter. They'd had a son long before, and then my cousin went barren. The prospective parents were so full of feeling on the subject that they asked me to accompany them as a cool-headed referee to help them choose. The man in charge at the Orphanage was alarmingly fat to be responsible for so many children, all scrawny as dog paws. But we'd come in time for the twice-weekly line-up when would-be parents were trooped along the dormitory floors where the children, sorted by age, would stand at the foot of their cot and let you ask them questions and feel their arms and legs for strength.

The infants were all in one big nursery in cribs like orange crates, and you were allowed to lift them and try to make them smile. A fair number of the children looked attractive to me, but way too many of them had the bluish thin skin that so often meant tuberculosis, and they all had mercilessly close-cropped hair to discourage outbreaks of head-lice. My cousin picked a three-year-old girl who could play the harmonica and was sweet as a pup but turned out to be a sweet helpless thief in later years.

So I'd been trying to brace myself to pa.s.s my findings on to Dinah, and through her to Harley, when the weather turned hot. Dinah was nearly halfway

through her term, and I really felt we had to choose a plan more or less immediately and get our minds and hearts into line to bear the separation when it came. I'd convinced myself that separation was the kindest course for a girl as young as Dinah. Leela agreed and I strongly suspected that Miss Olivia would stand behind me if Dinah objected. I take no pride in recalling that today. But anyone thinking I was curt and coldhearted should try to remember the tone of those times when b.a.s.t.a.r.d white children were scarce as white tigers and were cruelly treated in the outside world by young and old alike.

Despite the decision I'd made in my own mind as days went on, I felt a rising sense of the awfulness of having to make a decision at all. And the nights filled up with more and more desperate dreams, all featuring pitiful children. I couldn't discuss my concerns with anyone but Leela.

And on a broiling Sat.u.r.day morning in the midst of September, it was Leela who said we should just visit Dinah tomorrow and face all our fears. Under the pressure I'd made for myself, I accepted the offer. And in mid-afternoon after church and dinner, Leela came to collect me.

At the old Slade place once we got out of the car, the sunlight struck us like a slammed iron door. The shutters on every window were closed, and n.o.body stepped outside to greet us. When we tapped at the front door and stepped on in, n.o.body answered our first h.e.l.lo. That scared me at once, but Leela pushed on toward the kitchen and beckoned me to follow. All down that hallway I couldn't help thinking how little this house had changed since the first day I came here thirty-three years ago. No color had faded, nothing had darkened, every face in the pictures was still the same solemn age. Every splinter, every dust curl would outlast me.

In the kitchen Mally was sitting in the green straight chair leaning forward on the table in a nap. The air was entirely still and damp. Both stoves gave off scalding rays still, but Mally didn't seem to hear our footsteps.

So Leela bent forward and touched her on the arm.

Mally came up looking beat and baffled. Then she said "I'm dreaming I'm a Santa Claus

elf in a big freezer locker right at the North Pole."

Leela laughed. "That's the only cool job left." Freezer lockers were just then invading the South, but none of us had one.

When Mally offered to pour us iced tea, it scared me even worse. What was she holding back? So I had to ask where Dinah might be.

Mally lowered her voice to a whisper. "She and Miss Olivia stretched out in yonder." She pointed behind her to the back bedroom (that opened off the kitchen) and lowered her voice still softer to say "Miss Olivia been trying not to buckle in all this heat--not doing too good."

"And Dinah?" I said.

Mally said "Dinah stronger than me."

No sooner did I feel slightly relieved when there stood Dinah in the bedroom doorway yawning but smiling. She gave a little wave to me and Leela, then raised a hus.h.i.+ng finger, stepped forward and began to shut the door behind her.

But Miss Olivia's voice said "Dinah? Company?"

Dinah said "Grandmother, you need your rest. It's just my mother."

Miss Olivia said "Just? Anna Slade's the one daughter-in-law I've got that I'd cross the road for." I truly think that was the one time she sent a whole word of praise in my direction, and it was not exactly a reckless hymn, was it? Still it came on the last day it could have, so I've always been grateful.

To the best of my knowledge, this is what happened. With help from Dinah, Miss Olivia got herself up and slowly joined us at the kitchen table. I've mentioned her looking frail before. She hadn't recovered any of the flesh she'd been steadily losing, but then she didn't seem any frailer today. And once we'd all drunk a little iced tea and talked about odds and ends, I felt compelled to bring up the subject of my explorations--the matter of what to do with this child once it came to life. I know I expressed it in just those terms, Once it comes to life.

Miss Olivia said "It's a boy or girl, Anna. It's alive this minute. It lives here with me." She looked round for Mally who was combing her hair in a mirror on the kitchen

mantel. "Lives with us, don't it, Mally?"

I could see Mally wince. She hated being cornered but she said "Lives anywhere you are, yes ma'm--correct."

Miss Olivia faced Dinah then. And I wished I could have dropped off the Earth, for starting trouble on a punis.h.i.+ng day. Miss Olivia waited for Dinah to agree; and when Dinah stayed quiet, Miss Olivia said "I'll take out legal papers if you want me to. No kin child of mine will go for an orphan." She said the word orphan slowly enough to let us all hear that it was one of the saddest words in the English language. And she said it straight at me, no one else. The blaze that would have burned in her eyes in the old days when I was a young bride was a low s.h.i.+ne now but a s.h.i.+ne all the same.

I thought I'd just withdraw and wait for a cooler calmer opportunity to talk with my own daughter about urgent business. Leela had already given me several hus.h.i.+ng looks. So I turned to Dinah and tried to show that my present silence was a mark of respect to this old lady. It was far from total surrender to the lady's old ideas. In any case I didn't know Dinah's feelings, not her present feelings, on the baby's future.

But Miss Olivia saw us sharing a glance and said to Dinah "You're still with me, aren't you?"

That struck me too hard. Dinah was my own blood-and-bone daughter. If anybody did, I had rights here in this grim house and for numerous reasons. No way would any grandchild of mine wind up under this vicious roof in the country with a woman ninety years old, however headstrong. I reached out my right hand to Dinah, and she gave me hers. All I said was "Darling, we'll do the right thing."

I'd watched Dinah age and strengthen in the past months. Anyone living near Olivia Larkin Slade would strengthen fast or be ground to paste by the first sundown. The fact I had to remember, though, was--this was a child nearly fourteen years old with no husband, no prospect who could promise her more than Harley Beecham, a child himself and no boy-genius. Yet I'll have to grant that, this awful day, Dinah Slade looked smart and sober enough to make any choice her life could hurl at her.